First-time Photoshoot

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I've been interested in cosplay for several years now, and for the past few years I've been wanting to delve into cosplay photography. Had my first photoshoot with an amazing cosplay group last weekend. They were really great to work with!

For your first shoot I think these are really good. I don't know this series but the characters' poses and emotions come out well. I really wanted to go to the Cosplay Expo but wasn't able to make it. The Japanese Garden location is really nice!

The main issues I see are some technical things.

I think some of the photos could be cropped to avoid distracting things, like this one:
[url]https://www.flickr.com/photos/mibanez/22971703139/in/photostream/[/url]

Be careful with on-camera flash. Sometimes it helps when you use it as fill-flash but when the flash is on-camera the lighting always looks flat, without shadows to show the shape of your subject. It normally looks more natural to use off-camera flash or bounced flash.
[url]https://www.flickr.com/photos/mibanez/22971694789/in/photostream/[/url]

Be very careful, especially in direct sunlight, to avoid clipped highlights. Most of the photos with direct sun have some clipped highlights, which turn a funny green color before turning white. Clipped highlights in the background can look ok but clipped highlights on skin or hair looks sort of like a digital disease. When you review the photos watch out for blinking areas that are clipped (you may have to turn this setting on). I've never used this camera but it looks like there are some other settings with exposure and dealing with highlights like HTP and ALO that are worth checking out:
[url]http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/canon-sl1/canon-sl1A5.HTM[/url]

If you shoot RAW you may be able to recover clipped highlights when post processing on your computer too.

I think that first one is great! It's very cool because you have a foreground element (the brush) to give the photo dimension and depth. Compare it to your others ones like, say, on the bridge where it's an open shot of them just on a bridge and it feels more flat.

In the first one you were also shooting at the longer range (55mm on your lens, 85mm full-frame equivalent). This gave a compressed view which in my opinion is more interesting than the ones on the bridge where you shot them at 35mm, giving you a 50mm equivalent and closer to the normal human eye perspective, which in my opinion is less interesting despite what many people say.

Finally, you have a cool frame-within-a-frame composition, working together with the leaves in the foreground to give even more depth and interest. I think you were also very close to a nice triangle composition with the three subjects, but the Fuu cosplayer is a little too far and low for me. If anything I would prefer the middle person to be a little higher than the others, usually.